This fine critical study of dystopian fiction becomes more accessible to
readers now that it has been released in paperback. The authors, four highly
regarded scholars, turn their considerable talents to a timely question: how does
contemporary children’s literature contribute both to the critique of society
and to creating a vision for/ envisaging better world? They enlist postmodern and
critical theories from various disciplines to produce cogent, engaging analyses
of dystopian and utopian literature. They seek to identify what they call a
‘transformative utopianism’ from the global perspectives of colonialism and
neocolonialism, environmentalism, and the family. Noting that children’s literature
can ‘lead in new directions while the existing critical paradigms lag considerably’
(7), they work to position texts within the ‘domains of democracy, social justice,
politics, and struggle’ (7).

Key to the book’s scope—and success—is its definition of terms. The authors
interpret the terms ‘utopia’ and ‘dystopia’ broadly to include critiques of present
realities as well as imaginings of future possibilities. The result is critical
flexibility and a wide range of fiction and film under review, from films The
Incredibles and Toy Story to Julia Bertagna’s novel Exodus
and Gloria Whelan’s fictionalized account of Louisa May Alcott’s Fruitlands.
Also key to this discussion is a clear sense of history. Noting that children’s
literature published from 1988 to 2006 ‘is marked by a pervasive commitment to social
practice’ (2), the authors cite the influence of global events on children’s
literature, specifically the end of the Cold War, the dismantling of the Soviet
Union, South African apartheid, and the wars in Bosnia and the Persian Gulf. These
events, they argue, have created shifts away from nuclear disaster to more
ecological, global, and apocalyptic concerns.

Far from being a specialized or marginalized field, children’s literature
fully enters the mainstream of cultural and literary discourse in this study.
Critical touchstones include David Harvey’s Marxist framework, which emphasizes
the importance of spatiality in configuring competing visions of social and political
orders; Richard Rorty’s pragmatic liberalism, which recognizes the contingency
of social formations, language, and identity; and Henry Giroux’s ‘language of
critique and possibility’, which links concept and practice. What emerges is a
theoretically sophisticated and dynamic rather than static understanding of
utopian and dystopian forms and themes.

Readers will find the book’s organization both welcoming and challenging. A
clearly written introduction explains terms and theories in mostly jargon-free
discourse despite the complexity of ideas under consideration. The second chapter
provides an overview of the ‘genres, forms, and narrative strategies by which
children’s texts engage with contemporary political and social discourses’ (8).
Six subsequent chapters consider the impact of globalization, colonialism,
environmentalism, communitarianism, home and family, and the posthuman as they
relate to imaginings of new world orders. Some readers may find the textual
analyses disorienting if they are not familiar with the fiction and films under
review, yet most will appreciate the accumulated understanding that results from
the authors’ examination of particular texts from various perspectives, often in
more than one chapter. The primary literature is only indexed by author or
director; the addition of indexing by title would make it easier to locate critical
discussions; an entry for Gloria Whelan’s Fruitlands seems to be missing.

A distinct strength of the book is its attention to child agency. To the
question, “Who can change the world?” the authors answer, at least in part,
children can. The inclusion of film as well as text allows consideration of the
child’s point of view, as film often privileges the perspective of the child.
The authors also define agency broadly, exploring various forms of subjectivities
and the extent to which human needs and agency are restrained by existing
institutions and practices. They assess the individual capacity for self-improvement
and social reform, the aspiration toward agency, and the likelihood of its
attainability.

They also consider the relation of utopian and dystopian literature to the
bildungsroman, a staple of children’s and young adolescent literature.
They show how postmodern notions of subjectivity, in which identity is fluid,
performative, and transitional, interrelate with traditional narratives of
individual development. They show in provocative ways how dystopian and utopian
visions bend notions of individual identity to imagine new world orders. They
address conformity and repression as well as surveillance, timely topics in the
context of social media and the so-called war against terrorism. And they position
dystopian and utopian children’s literature in the context of young adult fiction,
which is often marked by pessimism.

The authors conclude by noting a high rate of change in children’s literature
without presuming positive outcomes of these changes. Despite the power of
contemporary children’s literature to reimagine and reconfigure existing structures,
they acknowledge ‘the preponderance of dystopian over utopian narratives’ (129).
They also note the extent to which representations of dystopias and utopias
reinscribe features of social life they ostensibly challenge. For example, Lois
Lowry’s trilogy, The Giver, Gathering Blue, and The Messenger
is ‘more conservative than transformative’, with its Christian imagery, valorization
of the traditional nuclear family, and emphasis on gifted individualism rather than
collective action (110). Lowry’s texts, they argue, ‘play out an uneasy dialogue
between humanist conceptions of the individual, and utopian ideals which promote
communitarian action’ (111). Similarly, Nina Bawden’s Off the Road
falls short of utopian ideals by taking an ‘anti-critical perspective of a
totalitarian social order’ (115). Jean Ure’s Come Lucky April reimagines
gender relations through matriarchy yet reinstates binary oppositions between
hetero- and homosexual identities and only partially affirms the exercise of
choice that is essential to democratic ideals. Critical dystopias such as the
anime, Spirited Away, and Louise Murphy’s The True Story of Hansel
and Gretel retain utopian traces with their themes of redemption, but
Murphy’s narrative is ambivalent about the nature and source of evil, ‘abrogat[ing]
human agency and responsibility for action’ (141). Many environmentally aware
texts, the authors conclude, remain anthropocentric ‘rather than engaging with
biocentrism or “deep ecology”’ (9).

Whether these literary developments represent a ‘constant state of crisis’, as
the authors suggest, will be a topic of continuing discussion (40 page ref).
Readers will find much of value in New World Orders, including those
engaged in American studies, who are invited to consider whether and how writers
of dystopian fictions challenge the idea of the United States as a ‘city upon a
hill’ and thus signal the end of American exceptionalism. This theoretically
informed book lives up to the aim stated in the preface of the series of which
is a part: ‘to identify and publish the best contemporary scholarship and
criticism on children’s and young adolescent literature, film, and media texts’
(vi).